Mention a silent and pensive girl in a red dress and most of us will maybe think about the protagonist of The Handmaid's Tale, but Italian street artist Francesco Camillo Giorgino - aka Millo - had in mind someone else in his latest mural, entitled "Dream" and completed just a few days ago in his adoptive city of Pescara, on the Adriatic Sea.
An architecture graduate, Giorgino prefers decorating rather than designing buildings and he has become well-known for seamlessly integrating the architectural features of a building - a window or chimneys for example - in his intricate works.
Millo's vignettes are usually rather uplifting and empowering, encouraging the people who see them to get on in life and find the proverbial silver lining in every cloud. Quite often his murals represent gigantic figures, usually kids who look like grown ups and who move and act around imaginary cities made of intricate streets, with highways that spiral around buildings and planes flying up above in the sky among cartoonish clouds.
His characters - usually the only splash of colour among black and white cities - do not seem to care about cars and planes, though, they bathe in rivers or hug gigantic trees that surprising sprout among skyscrapers, exploring and playing with the urban setting. In a way you could interpret these characters as the quiet and silent spirits of the space they are inhabiting, spreading around universal and positive messages of love.
The graffiti artist mainly focuses on large-scale artworks: he employs multi-story blocks of flats, schools and juvenile penitentiaries as large canvases and has so far taken part in art festivals all over Europe, creating murals all over the world from Turin in Italy to Santiago in Chile, Kremenchuk in Ukraine, Luzhi in China and Jyväskäla in Finland.
"Dream" was painted in Fontanelle, one of the poorest suburbs of Pescara, and it is part of a local requalification project. In the mural a giant girl in a bright red dress stands in front of a manual food grinder, mounted on the side of a roofless building that opens up on a bedroom where someone is quietly sleeping.
The girl is throwing inside the grinder a photograph, candies, a key, a watch, toys and other random objects, but, rather than destroying the items, she is transforming them into tiny stars and sprinkling them above the bedroom.
The message is simple and obvious - don't give up on life and never forget to dream - and Millo wishes in this way to give hope and strength to all sorts of people, from the people living in Fontanelle to those ones who are just passing by, or to his fans who will see these images online.
This is the first large-scale graffiti Millo did in Pescara, but the graffiti artist decorated a while back also the exterior of a local bar located in the Old Town of the city.
Expect a fashion collaboration at some point soon: if you close your mind you can easily picture Millo's graffiti decorating the walls of a Prada runway or its clothes and accessories.
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